Johnson, 43, and her cousin became wards of the home in 1977 or 1978, after the woman left them at the orphanage, she states in a sworn affidavit that is part of a proposed class action lawsuit against the home and the province.

Started in 1921 with funds from the province, the home is run by a volunteer board. However, the province has continued to provide the bulk of its financial support.

The home also does its own fundraising. It has held a Broadcast for Funds every year since 1931, first on radio and then television.

Johnson’s reasons for being brought to the home are much like those of many who arrived there, going back as far as the 1920s.

Most of the children were black like Johnson. A smaller number were white or biracial.

Some were orphans; some were not.

Johnson says she never met her birth father and only encountered her mother later in life.

Her grandmother died in 1976, she says in her affidavit, and then her grandfather started drinking heavily.

“My grandfather became an alcoholic,” Johnson stated. “We did not have enough food.”

Her existence after she was taken to the home included two years as a prostitute after she ran away, alleges Johnson’s explicit affidavit, filed June 9 in Nova Scotia Supreme Court.

She’s alleged a former staffer at the home was her pimp.

Thousands of children stayed at the home in its first 50 years, according to an account written by a board member in the early 1970s.

Later, the residential population declined. In 1978, the home moved to two new buildings nearby on Highway 7, leaving the old home empty.

At the home, Johnson’s life appears much worse than it had been with her grandfather.

She says she lived in squalor, dressed in tattered clothes and slept on threadbare sheets in the freezing cold.

“I would quickly learn that many of the residents suffered from head lice,” her affidavit states. “I recalled meeting other residents for the first time. I recall that they stunk. Their clothes were stain-covered. I was scared and did not like being there.”

The physical and sexual abuse soon started, she alleges.

“Within my first week, I wet my bed. It was an accident. When staff discovered this accident, I was beaten with a belt.”

In an interview in Montreal this summer, Johnson said she was struck with rulers, belts, switches “straight off trees” and wooden paddles, and still bears a scar over one eye.

Name-calling was also a fact of life at the home, Johnson asserts in her affidavit.

“The black residents were called ‘niggers.’ The white residents were called ‘honkys or crackers.’ ”

In her affidavit, Johnson says that one staffer – Georgie Williams — also took her into a life of prostitution.

Selling sex for money was a far cry from summers at her grandparents’ home, picking blueberries in their backyard and eating the morning porridge her grandmother brought to the kitchen table for her and Russell.

“Up until my grandma passed away, I had it pretty normal, you know,” she said.

Like other former home residents, Harriet has had nightmares and anxiety attacks, she said in the interview.

She can’t work, unable to keep a handle on recurrent bouts of anger.

While she was at the home outside Dartmouth, she dreamt of the day her life would return to “normal,” and that her family would come back and save her.

“I remember looking up to the stars one evening, I was lying on the ground and I remember looking up and saying ‘Send me my mother.’ And I put this vision in my head that my mom was a big movie star. She was beautiful, gorgeous; she was going to find out where I was. She was going to come rescue me, and everything was going to be fine.